EVERY WRECKER HAS A STORY, DON’T IT?

In its day, two decades ago, this car was legendary.

It was already about fifteen years old and had been seriously modified. It belonged (and still does) to my friend’s big brother. We’ll call her JS and we’ll call her brother RS since I can’t think of anything better to call them.

RS was one very interesting individual. He was about ten years older than JS and he was big. He did absolutely perfect imitations of Worf from Star Trek. He wore plaid shirts. He was the kind of born again Christian who took no crap from anybody and called it like he saw it. And he built some unbelievably hot cars, dude.

This was his car, a Buick Skylark. (Jethro and I are debating the year-possibly 1971) It was one of the fastest street machines in the area and that’s quite an honour, because our neck of the 519 area code was literally crawling with hot cars. In any small town on a hot summer night in the 80s, you’d hear them- no, you’d feel them- as they rumbled down the street, barely keeping those RPMs down to legal limits. If RS happened to cruise by in this car, it was like the parting of the Red Sea. Just get outta the way. He wins.

There was no mistaking it either. No other car had a colour anywhere near this. Even now in its permanently decrepit state, you can see that. RS told us that the paint was a total fluke. I’m not sure anymore if he ordered green paint and the shop mixed it wrong, or if somebody else wouldn’t take it because it was wrong, or if RS and his seriously edgy friends threw a bunch of paint in a huge drum and came up with this bizarre colour.



He and his two buddies had their own car club, just the three of them. They had a name and everything. Each of their vehicles had a name too. I can't remember those names.

I should ask RS about these things next time I see him. Or maybe not. A little bit of mystery only adds to the story.

In any case, being a small, goofy skinny teenager impatient for a driver’s license, I looked up to my friend’s brother with big wide eyes.

I hadn’t seen The Skylark in ages and assumed that it had been scrapped long ago. RS and my dad are still pretty good buds. I may have mentioned before that my ol man is the Guy With Five Acres and a Shop, and therefore ends up with a lot of buds and their stuff. RS has two pieces of stuff on my ol man’s five acres. One is a brown road worthy Skylark which shares barn space in the winter with my saddles and bridles and sweet feed bin. The other one is...The Skylark.

I couldn’t believe it when I saw it last fall. I thought it was lost and gone forever. I mean, sure, it’s a mere shadow of its glorious former self. But we car freaks, junk collectors, whatever you wanna call us, we have a hard time letting go of our legendary machines. There might be a part that can be pirated off of it and in a way our favourite car can “live” on a little longer. And some of us, of course, simply have an insidious mental illness that forces us to hoard every piece of crap we ever laid our hands or our hot little accelerator foot on.



Both RS and JS live in the same town now with their own families. JS has gotten over her car silliness but I don’t think RS ever will. He’s always got a project, like he always did before, and like my dad, will never run out of projects. I’m not really sure what’s in store for The Skylark. It doesn’t really matter though. We stood there with our hands jammed in our pockets as if we were admiring it at a main street Show & Shine, breathing lightly on it but not touching it, because in our minds it was still a lean mean shiny green pavement eating machine.